My Story

Something you should know about me:

I’ve always loved to tell stories. In school, I was an avid writer and art student. Yet, my chorus teacher is the one who launched me into the field of professional print journalism, as he knew someone at People magazine.What started with an unpaid summer internship ended with a tall, unforgettable Texan editor paying me $1,000 for my work and a field assignment as the youngest member of the People team covering spring break in Fort Lauderdale. From there, I followed the trailblazing editor Pat Ryan, seeking an internship at LIFE magazine with the opening line, “Perhaps you remember me. I’m the one who came in over the transom and left with $1,000 bucks.”

I broke into television when a patient of my father’s was interviewed for a public television documentary. An introduction was made, an internship turned into roles as researcher, associate producer, and coordinating producer, and those 7 years were filled with long-form documentaries, weekly interview shows, and live television, working for the best names in the business, including Bill Moyers, David Grubin, and CBS’s 60 Minutes. (When Bill Moyers took a 6-month sabbatical, I traveled to Italy where I worked at a video production company on “spot pubblicita” — commercials — and where my hand enjoyed 15 minutes of fame in a Maltese soft drink commercial! But I digress…)

Television had captivated me with its moving visuals and then “new media” added interactivity to the equation. The visionary Bob Greenberg of R/GA suggested I look into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), but attempts to learn more were thwarted for weeks. Putting on my reporter’s cap, I decided to show up. The head of the program just happened to walk by and we discovered we shared a background in documentary film. A week later, I found myself enrolled in a full-time, 2-year graduate program. It was 1996 and like most people, I had never sent an email. My teacher put the syllabus on the Internet — I decided she was playing hardball.

What followed was an immersion in a new way of thinking about multimedia, technology, and interactivity. Plus a realization that, while the tools are ever-evolving, they must take their cue from the story and be chosen accordingly. I had always enjoyed telling and sharing stories and now I had a greater vocabulary with which to tell them.

I piloted a single-engine, 4-seater plane for about 10 minutes when I interviewed the head of the aviation agency for the Yale Daily News. In another part of the forest, someone who looked suspiciously like me joined some Romans inside the walls of the Colosseum ’round midnight. I hear it was magical.